Wednesday, January 23, 2013

This will be a short post, in the main due to so little information
being available, and the band having released so little during their existence.
This in itself is rather a shame, because what they did do, while minimalist,
is difficult not to like.

Started up by Jed, (formerly with Stockholm Monsters) and
Dave, Lavolta Lakota sprang up out of Manchester in 1982, which was convenient
since it gave them the opportunity to meet Peter Hook of Joy Divison / New
Order fame who managed to help them get their single out through the Belgium
arm of Factory Records, despite not being formally signed to the label. It also
gave Dave some work as a roadie for New Order.

In 1983, the band records the track “Nightmare” on a double compilation
cassette The Angels Are Coming (Pleasantly Surprised, 1983) alongside much
bigger bands including Bauhaus, The March Violets, The Alarm, Bone Orchard,
Death in June, Gene Loves Jezebel, Nico, Artery and Test Department. Interestingly,
Jed’s old band Stockholm Monsters also put in an appearance.

Cover art of The Angels are Coming compilation

Nightmare

By the time the single is recorded, bassist Michael
Eastwood has curiously decided to start calling himself “Moist” (as you do), and ensuring that the band maintain their distinctive line up of having two bass
players. Also interesting is that the single was produced by Peter Hook under
the psyudonym Be-Music.

The cover art bears a pleasingly tribal aesthetic,
reflecting the band’s interest in American Indian culture which they shared
with Southern Death Cult who they would occasionally support. Indeed, Lavolta
Lakota translates as “all the tribes
together”.

Prayer

Mitawin

A second single is reportedly planned, but somehow never
eventuates. They are successful however in supporting Death Cult, Play Dead,
New Order, Cabaret Voltaire, The Fall, and are occasionally joined onstage by
Billy Duffy during 1985. Things grind to a halt the following year though as members
begin to drift away, some to form BFG and Dave to join Peter Hook in Revenge.

Saturday, January 12, 2013

Now here we have something genuinely interesting, unique and
original. Considering the wide and more than often, very weird scope of their
output, to try to classify or confine them under the “Goth” tag seems somehow
insulting, and like many bands at the time, it seems wildly unlikely that they
would concur anyhow. To attempt to describe their work as anything more
specific than what falls under the very wide umbrella of bizarre art-rock is
probably self-defeating – it simply doesn’t work. That is not to say however, that what The
Virgin Prunes would produce was frequently very grim, desolate and grotesque. That
said, they certainly belong here, but people who understand “Goth” only as
something that sounds like The Sisters of Mercy or Fields of the Nephilim would
likely find their material extremely strange and difficult to get a grip on.

However, we’re getting way ahead of ourselves.

The tale we need to tell of the band, begins quite strangely indeed with something called Lypton Village. Don’t for one moment go thinking that this was a band however, rather it seems to have been a kind of odd little tribe of the more arty young Dublin folk, who finding their existence in that city rather more than mundane, retreated into a sort of fantasy land where everyone got a new identity. And so, Fionan Hanvey became Gavin Friday, Derek Rowan became Guggi, his brother Trevor Rowan became Strongman, Daniel Figgis became Haa-Lacka Bintti, Paul Hewson became Bono Vox and David Evans assumed the moniker of The Edge.

If those last two names seem familiar, then well they should, since they would of course go on to form U2, one of the biggest bands in rock history. Strange as it now may seem, in the early days, both U2 and The Virgin Prunes would often share a stage together. Indeed, The Edge’s brother & U2’s original guitarist Dik Evans would later join Virgin Prunes. I must agree that in retrospect the combination superficially appears very odd, but then that’s probably due to the fact that most people have long since forgotten that U2 started out as a very good, albeit very accessible post-punk act.

U2 – Out of
Control (1980)

It wouldn’t last of course – U2’s increasingly mainstream musical tendencies would soon cause the two bands to drift apart. I suspect, although can’t find any direct evidence to support the hypothesis, is that U2’s increasingly Christian inclinations by the time of their second album October (Island, 1981 )may also have had a part to play.

But enough of
U2 – you can read about them anywhere! Back to Virgin Prunes.

Virgin Prunes release their debut EP Twenty Tens (Baby, 1980), three years after their formation. The cover art of a small girl playing with her bunny wabbits certainly seems innocent enough – almost like an illustration from a Victorian children’s story. However, combine this with the band’s name, the unsettling and generally sombre musical tone and song titles like “Twenty-Tens( I’ve been Smoking all Night)”, “Revenge” or “The Children are Crying”, and it’s impossible to ignore that there is something very subversive, and perhaps even unwholesome going on here. It’s probably safe to say that Gavin Friday’s happy warblings of “I hear the children crying as they all die of fever” was never going to get the band a shot on the Eurovision Song Contest at any time soon.

The Twenty Tens EP

The following year saw the band release the Moments and Mime (Despite Straight Lines 7” (Rough Trade, 1981). Once again, the front cover art appears innocent enough, although the back cover gives us a much better idea that things are far from normal here, and that impression is confirmed by the B-Side track “In the Greylight” which serves to complete the impression that we’re no longer in Kansas anymore Toto.

In the Grey Light

The same year sees the band start to release the “New Form
of Beauty” series in four parts (Rough Trade, 1981-82), its name itself perhaps
a manifesto of intent. These will all be
later compiled into a single CD (A New Form of Beauty, New Rose, 1993), of
which sample tracks like “Come to Daddy”
clearly indicate that we’re not destined for safe or familiar territory quite
yet. Much strangeness remains. Meanwhile, drummer Haa-Lacka Bintti has left the
band and gone off to do his own project with the disconcertingly monikered
Princess Tinymeat. He is replaced by Mary D’Nellon.

Come to Daddy

These early gigs must have been quite something to
behold. Jonny Slut (later to become
keyboardist with Specimen) describes his first encounter with Virgin Prunes
shortly after he arrived in London:

“Saw the Virgin Prunes
the next week though, they blew my head off a bit. That was the best gig I’ve
seen in my life…The whole audience when they played at Heaven…David came on and
did his spastic stuff and I thought oh, this ain’t that brilliant! Then Gavin
and Guggi came in their black and white dresses and the audience were like that
(holds mouth open for impromptu dental appraisal)…honestly, it was quite
frightening, we were just like that for half an hour, no-one in the audience
clapped, we didn’t know what to do. They went off and came back on in their loin
cloths with their fruit and started chucking tables about, demonically
chanting…it was just brilliant – the best.”

(Gothic Rock, Mercer, Pegusus, 1992)

And so we arrive in 1982 with The Virgin Prunes’ first full
length album, If I Die, I Die. It’s no exaggeration to say that this is one of
my favourite albums of all time, at once hauntingly beautiful and deeply
unsettling, and effect only added to by the band’s very unorthodox vocal
stylistics. There’s something oddly faux-oriental about the guitar on this
album that doesn’t come out on the band's other releases. Indeed, after
listening to it many years ago after consuming something hallucinogenic and almost
certainly illegal, I had to give it a rest for a few months because it kept
conjuring up recurring mental images of insane Fu Manchuesque vivisectors.

We begin with the yearningly desolate “Ulakanakulot / Decline and Fall” which sets the tone for the rest
of the album – it’s very clear that this is not going to be a happy journey.

“See the children play by, running try to
touch the sky,

When one falls you hear a cry

‘You’re dead, you’re dead, you must die’

‘Take a dream and fly away, take a dream and
fly away’

She will call

They will wait for you not I, they will wait
for you not I

See me crawl

And sometimes I feel so old

I never smile nor do cry

Shadows flicker from above.”

“Sweet Home Under
White Clouds” follows and is similarly bleak, although perhaps less
harrowing than the earlier version that appeared on A New Form of Beauty 2, and
next comes the very enigmatic “Bau-Dachong”
which is anyone’s guess as to what it might be about.

At this point we arrive at “Baby Turns Blue”, a happy little ditty about drug overdose, and of
course, the band’s big single, still packing out dance floors in Goth clubs to
this day. To judge from the behaviour of some DJs, it would be easy to believe
that it and the “Pagan Love Song” single (Rough
Trade, 1982) were the only songs The Virgin Prunes ever wrote. Indeed, back
when I was DJing in the 90s, it got so over-requested that I actually started
refusing to play it. Nevertheless, it remains the cheeriest and most upbeat If
I Die, I Die would get. I was also released as a 12” remix The Faculties of a
Broken Heart (Rough Trade, 1982).

The Baby Turns Blue 7" - that commercial success would elude the band seems simply inconceivable

After this we unfortunately hit the sole low point of the
album “Ballad of the Man”. What the
fuck were they thinking? The nicest I can imagine is that the song was a
deliberate attempt to take the piss out of contemporary folk music. Whatever their
reasoning, it very much spoils the flow of an otherwise near-flawless album.

Fortunately things quickly pick up again with “Walls of Jericho”, a song so strong that
it could easily have been a single in its own right. The puzzling Caucasian
Walk follows before the album closes with the excellent “Theme
for Thought” with its reflections on individuality and quoting of Oscar
Wilde’s “The Ballad of Reading Gaol”.

“He did not wear his scarlet robe, for blood
and wine are red,

And blood and wine were on his hands when
they found him with the dead.”

Ulakanakulot / Decline
and Fall (Live)

Sweet Home Under White Clouds

Bau-Dachong

Baby Turns Blue

Ballad of the Man (not live but WTF cares?)

Walls of Jericho

Caucasian Walk

Theme for Thought

After this, the band produce the Heresie EP, making them one
of the very few bands from the scene to receive an arts grant for a
commissioned work. Work on a second full length album Sons Find Devils (Not to
be confused with the video of the same name) is commenced but never released
and in 1984 the original band begins to dissolve. A final studio album, The Moon
Looked Down and Laughed (Baby Records, 1986) appears after which Gavin Friday departs
for a solo career, effectively ending Virgin Prunes forever. Some of the remaining members will eventually
reform as The Prunes, but it is reportedly a much tamer beast than its
notorious ancestor.

Track Listing

i.Ulakanakulot

ii.Decline and Fall

iii.Sweet Home Under White Clouds

iv.Bau-Dachong

v.Baby Turns Blue

vi.Ballad of the Man

vii.Walls of Jericho

viii.Caucasian Walk

ix.Theme For Thought

Later versions on CD include a
variety of bonus tracks, most notably Pagan
Love Song, but also Dave-id is Dead,
Fado, Chance of a Lifetime and Yeo.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

We have of course discussed the works of Diamanda Galas
before, but her period before the Masque of the Red Death trilogy (Mute
1986-1988) is worth discussing too.

Her early works with composers Vinko Globakar and Ianis
Xenakis are probably no secret to fans of avant-garde opera. Similarly her
early guest appearance with Jim French (If Looks Could Kill, Metalanguage,
1979) is probably well known to followers of leftfield contemporary jazz.

Her first solo release (or at least official first) was the
Litanies of Satan 12” (originally on Y, 1982, but later re-released on a number
of labels, most notably Mute, 1989) is so notorious that it’s barely worth
commenting on, beyond adding that it is one of the most out-there things you
are ever likely to hear, side A being a rendition of French decedent poet
Charles Baudelaire’s poem of the same name, and side B “Wild Women With Steak Knives” being a jolly little hymn to the
joys of schizophrenia.

I suggest you get a hold of it – wonderful for taking
revenge on annoying neighbours, clearing the house of party guests who have outstayed their welcome or terrifying household pets. (As an aside, on most
versions of Litanies of Satan, the track listing is back to front. The number
of commentators over the years who have missed this is simply astounding. The
title track is the one in French – it’s not difficult to work out FFS.)

The original release on Y records (1982)

What’s not so commonly realised is that sandwiched in
between the Litanies of Satan 12” and the Masque of the Red Death project there
is a long lost album, long deleted, hard to find, and vinyl copies in good
condition quite expensive.

This is the self-titled album,
sometimes known as “The Metalanguage
Album”, but most commonly known as “Panoptikon”.
This is much in the same line as Litanies of Satan – two very long tracks of
experimental scary electronica each occupying a side to themselves, and of
course, Diamanda’s multiple microphone madness continues. I'm not sure you could classify this as "Goth", but trying to classify it as anything else would be equally problematic. The first track, “Panoptikon” is based on the prison
experiences of Jack Abbott, while exploring the slightly sinister ideas of Jeremy Bentham, a prison in which all inmates could be observed at all times.
On the second side we find “Tragouthia
Apo To Amia Exon Fonos”. (A Song for
the Blood of those Murdered), Diamanda’s tribute to those who suffered under
the Greek Junta.

I think that it’s important to note that while Diamanda will
forever be associated with her work dealing with the AIDS pandemic, themes of
persecution have always been central to her art. The specific topics dealt with
on this album are ones she will return to years in the future: treatment of
prisoners in “Iron Lady” on
Malediction and Prayer (Mute, 1998), dedicated to Aileen Wuornos, and mass
persecution on “Defixiones: Will and Testament” (Mute, 2003), a piece dedicated
to the Armenian, Greek and Assyrian genocides that took place after World War
One, a chapter of history swept under the rug when acknowledging it proved
inconvenient to re-uniting Europe after the war.

Why on earth was Panoptikon deleted? When I interviewed
Diamanda on college radio back in 1992, I asked her if there were any plans to
re-issue it to which she responded

“No, I’ve never been
satisfied with the production values on that recording”.Although I’ve occasionally wondered if that was the complete story, it was
a pretty definite “no” and twenty years on, and almost thirty years since the album’s
release, its chances of ever being reissued seem ever more remote.

Personally, I think that’s rather a shame, so in the interests of posterity,
here it is:

A Welcome and Introduction

Plunder the Tombs was started back in 2010 by way of looking back on a musical past that I felt in sore need of curation.

It was a strange and sad time when what passed for “Goth” in clubs seemed a pale imitator of what once was, following first a decade of cookie-cutter Sisters of the Nephilim clone bands and then another decade of industrial dance being palmed off to younger audiences as a type of faux goth. When on rare occasion DJs in “Goth” clubs did finally become brave enough to play something like Bauhaus it was not untypical to have the dance floor clear, and it became obvious that the memory, meaning and legacy of much that had gone before had been lost.

It’s probably safe to say that the boundaries of what was “Goth” were never clearly defined. An absolute blessing for those bands on the original scene before it had a name pinned to the donkey, but an outright curse for those who came later and found rules had been imposed to dictate that which was and that which was not acceptable. Worse still was to come in the 90s from a lazy and unquestioning media who simply assumed that anything that wore black and make up was by definition “Goth”, thus allowing all manner of pretenders licence, and maximising confusion as to what the term actually referred to.

This has gone on for way too long and its time is at an end. Neo Post-Punk bands now proliferate across Europe, old long dead Goth bands rise from their crypts in the UK, and new deathrock bands are breeding like rabbits up the west coast of America. It is time to reclaim our scene back from metal bands and ravers in disguise.

While the Plunder the Tombs of old focused on what had gone before, there are now far too many exciting new things to ignore. We roar back to life in a reboot, covering past , present and things yet to come.

Let us plunder the tombs….

About Me

A DJ throughout the 90s at numerous Goth night clubs in Perth including The Cell, Dominion and others he was probably far too drunk to remember, largely as a result of his preference to work for bar tabs over cash. Also helped found 6RTR fm's Goth & Industrial showcase Darkwings.
More recent projects include the currently dormant Descent - a small night dedicated to playing genuinely good Goth music both old and new in preference to packing the dance floor with songs everyone had heard 20 million times before. He currently runs a monthly show on Behind the Mirror on 6RTR fm which can be heard on Wednesdays at 11pm WST.
Rumour has it he once masterminded an ill-advised Goth fanzine "Small Pleasures" that in retrospect, he remains profoundly grateful never made it off his desk.